Gary Lutz

"I told her I had been well into my central twenties before it dawned on me that to 'sleep with' someone didn’t simply mean to take a companion for your horizontal hours and thereby get sleep domed over you so much the higher than it would if you went home to bed alone. I had thought that was how you gave greater compass, greater volume, to your dreams."

From Lutz's new collection, Divorcer: a man mourns his deceased wife in an unorthodox fashion.

"Death didn’t have any of the detergent effect I thought I had been led to expect. Things that had looked violently dirtied before looked even dirtier now, and there was a marital malodor to our place, but make no mistake: we had been lovers, my wife and I, meaning mostly that we had coated things and people with love, had used our love to cover things up, to see to it that layer after layer got put over everything."